🔨 My Anti-Anti-Refractometer Rant, ✨ The Golden Age of Coffee

Views and news about the brews. Unique and relevant information for coffee professionals and enthusiasts.

Higher Extraction is always better. Unless it isn't.

🔨 I’m pretty bored of coffee professionals renouncing refractometers with phrases like “it’s a shame to see Baristas driven by numbers” and “we don’t use refractometers to dictate what we serve to our customers”. It’s lazy, wilful ignorance.

This week’s post by me is a series of rebuttals to these silly phrases. It’s a bit of a rant, but I just want everyone to move away from this crippling anti-intellectualism.

UC Davis, the SCAE/SCAA merger, Texas A&M, and the WCR are all going to do wonderful things for coffee science. What I feel compelled to add here is that anyone can do science. You don’t need a lab or crazy funding to do science. Please don’t sit back and rely on these bodies to spoon feed the secrets of coffee to you. Get off the couch, formulate some strong questions using socratic questioning, plan and write a useful hypothesis, design an experiment using the scientific method, and benefit from your own research.

I’d also recommend checking out this NPR article on the wildly popular “Design of Coffee” course at UC Davis. Sounds super fun!

Barista Hustle Facebook Group

This week we flew past 11,000 members and the now 18-strong mod team have been diligently replying to every post request. There’s going to be a quantum leap in how Barista Hustle does this whole question/answer thing in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out!